The Four Talismans and Other Stories is the final volume in a series of collections of the work of Charles Nodier (1780-1844), the great pioneer of the prose fiction of the French Romantic Movement. The stories in the present collection, often fantastic and unashamedly intellectual, mostly appear here for the first time in English, in masterful translations by Brian Stableford.

Among the contents is the bizarre novella "Inès de Las Sierras" (1837), in which, on December 24, 1812, three officers of the Napoleonic army traveling to Barcelona are forced to spend the night in an abandoned castle, where centuries ago a nobleman, Ghismondo de Las Sierras, stabbed his young wife Inés in the excesses of an orgy-but legend has it that every year, on Christmas Eve, Inés returns from the dead to take her revenge.